Bluie East Two Air Base#

The United States Air Force established a base on Ikateq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikkatteq called Bluie East Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluie_East_Two in 1941, under an agreement between the U.S. and Denmark, the latter of which had claimed Greenland in the early 18th century. The agreement made the U.S. the responsible for the defense of the island after Denmark fell into the hands of Nazi Germany. The base was abandoned after the war in 1947.

The U.S. Army air corps ran the Bluie East Two air base during World War II. Aircraft could land on a 5,000-foot long gravel runway and refuel on the base, located near the present-day village of Ikateq in Greenland. There was also a weather station providing forecasts to U.S. military personnel operating in the Arctic.

New York photographer Ken Bower visited the site in 2014 and 2015 to photograph the degradation. The resulting photo series, “American Flowers,” depicts a grim picture of military pollution in one of the most remote corners of the world. Bower titled the series using the nickname local Inuits gave the former American airbase.

“It was really erie because it is such a beautiful landscape,” says Bower. “Greenland is absolutely pristine, and you just have all these rusted elements basically rotting in a pristine environment.” The massive piles of barrels are still filled with fuel and the dozens of collapsed wooden buildings in the area have roof shingles made with asbestos.

A few years later in 1947, the air corps left the site, leaving behind them leaking fuel, rusting heavy metals, trucks, carcinogenic materials, and possibly 700 cases of undetonated dynamite. That last item is according to an article written by Bob Baxter, a man who claims he was a radio operator at Bluie East Two. Baxter even posted black and white photographs of himself standing next to a shed filled with dynamite that he was tasked to detonate. In his post, Baxter said some of that dynamite was also left behind by departing U.S. troops.

Bower’s photography has renewed public awareness about the dozens of abandoned U.S. military bases in Greenland that are still waiting to be cleaned up. Danish and Greenland ministers of environment visited Bluie East 2 on Aug. 20 (link in Danish), and Danish minister [Lunde Larsen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esben_Lunde_Larsen#:~:text=Esben%20Lunde%20Larsen%20(born%20November,election%20until%20October%201%2C%202018) commented that “Greenland should not be the world’s dustbin.” It remains unclear who should be in charge of any clean up, however.

Who Will Clean Up Hazardous Waste?#

Bluie East Two is just one of more than 30 abandoned U.S. military bases in Greenland dating from World War II or the Cold War, said Inuuteq Holm Olsen, the Greenland representative at the U.S. Embassy of Denmark.

For the people that live in Greenland, the rotting bases are a bitter reminder of an agreement they didn’t have a say in—Denmark didn’t grant Greenland partial autonomy until 1979—and a potential hazard to their way of life. Many Greenlanders live off hunting and fishing, and there’s no way of knowing what has been polluted, said Olsen.

“They are disgusted, to say the least,” he said. “We all try to teach children that you shouldn’t litter and be careful of what you put into the environment.”

A clause in the 1953 Greenland Defense Agreement enabled the U.S. to avoid responsibility. The clause states that any material or equipment brought to Greenland by the U.S. may be “disposed of in Greenland” and “any areas or facilities made available to the Government of the United States of America under this Agreement need not be left in the condition in which they were at the time they were thus made available.”

Weeding The American Flowers#

As Ken Bower’s pictures became popular on the Internet in 2016, he created an online petition to ask the United States to clean up Bluie East Two. To date, the petition has received more than 36,000 supporters.

“I care about the environment here in my country,” one supporter wrote. “Clean up your dirty mess, USA.”

While the petition didn’t reach the 100,000 signatures required to reach the White House, it did reach the Danish Parliament. Danish legislators signed a letter of intent to pay Greenland 150 million krone—or $23 million—over five years to clean up some of the old U.S. military bases.

Responsibility Is In The Air#

The question remains as to who is responsible for waste, pollution and threats to the environment from bases such as Bluie East 2.

The Greenlandic government has long had the “baseline that it should be the party that caused the pollution that should pay for the pollution”, as it was formulated in 2006 in a response from the member of the government for the environment, Asii Chemnitz Narup, to member of the parliament Anthon Frederiksen.

In 2012, Anthon Frederiksen himself became the National Council Member for the Environment—Greenland’s Minister of the Environment—and he entered into an environmental agreement with the then Danish Minister of Defence, Nick Hækkerup, on “handling environmental issues regarding the presence of the armed forces in Greenland”.

However, the agreement, which is just 25 lines long, does not say a word about responsibility for American military waste. During the negotiations, Nick Hækkerup told on this issue:

“The responsibility for what other parties may have caused must be raised against the other parties.” In Danish: the Greenlanders must figure that out for themselves with the Americans.

An agreement on the fate of the military facilities, which the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Uffe Ellemann-Jensen concluded with the Americans in 1991, gives a different impression. This stated that the United States, when withdrawing from military installations, “must remove or otherwise render harmless all known hazardous substances, including waste oil, chemical solvents, asbestos that can crumble, and PCBs.”

However, the Americans’ interpretation of the agreement has since changed. The then Foreign Minister Per Stig Møller stated in a parliamentary reply in 2003 that “the United States had made a significant change in its policy in this area in the mid-1990s, according to which environmental cleanup will only be carried out on overseas bases if there is an ‘imminent and substantial danger to human health.’

Svend Auken, who was Minister of the Environment when negotiations with the U.S. on the return of the Dundas Peninsula began, explained in the Christian Science Monitor that “they said that if they had to clean up after themselves in Thule, they would face similar demands in the Philippines, Japan and other places in the world. They did not want to create that precedent.”

And a Pentagon spokesman explained in the same newspaper that it was a matter of burden-sharing: the U.S. had provided a defense for the free world with its military installations—so others had to provide theirs by taking on the clean-up.

The Greenlandic government has periodically signaled that Denmark must assume responsibility for the cleanup, now that the Americans are unwilling. At other times, Greenlandic politicians have argued that the polluter—the United States—should pay. In continuation of the waste mapping in 2003, the self-government announced its own follow-up plan for “handling the waste in the open country”.

The plan was promised to be ready in 2006, but 10 years later it was not finished—the resources have been chosen to be used for something else.

Thus, responsibility is in the air. It is the clear assessment of legal experts that there is no legal basis for an agreement that allows a claim for compensation or cleanup to be made against the United States or Denmark for old facilities. The damage has occurred, and no one can be held formally responsible.

Denmark Makes Its Small Contribution#

By 2018 the Danish government had apparently finally given up on getting the U.S. to clean up a number of the U.S. military’s disused military facilities in Greenland.

For decades, they had been a thorn in the side of Greenland’s relationship to Denmark. Greenland held Denmark responsible for it as it had allowed the Americans to enter the country during the war. Denmark had tried for years to get the Americans to help finance the clean-up but the U.S., in turn, according to sources close to the Danish Government, were afraid of the legal ramifications across the world if they set such a precedent.

And that same stalemate had gone on for decades.

So, celebrations in Nuuk were significant, when in 2018 the Danish government finally relented and decided to invest around 24 million Euro (180 million DKK) in the full clean-up of the abandoned bases.

Today, six years on, progress on the clean-up has been slow. Only around 5.3 million еuro (40 million DKK) of that money has been spent.

Inuuteq Holm Olsen, head of the Greenland representation in Washington, D.C., notes that “it’s been an ongoing case for many years, where we have tried to address these issues to those who are responsible, be it Denmark who commissioned, or the Americans who established the base and left them”.

“It’s like speaking to a wall.”

Source:

• Photos: These beautiful, desolate Greenland fjords are being polluted by an abandoned U.S. army base / Quartz media
• Former U.S. air bases in Greenland during WWII / Research gate
• Abandoned American WW2 bases are slowly being removed from Greenland / Polar journal
• Danmark opgiver at få USA til at betale for rustne amerikanske olietønder og andet affald i Grønland / information.dk (in Danish)
• USA’s rustne arv i Grønland / information.dk

Further reading

• Monitoring of the Rehabilitation of the Historic World War II US Air Force Base in Greenland / MDPI journals